I’ve been a fan of Zojirushi for awhile now — they make the rice maker for cooking sushi rice (or other kind of rice). Given that their other big product lines are some very fine thermal carafes and hot-water dispensers, it’s not a real surprise that they make an excellent thermal carafe coffee maker as well.

Unlike their fuzzy-logic rice makers (which are smarter than many of the computers I’ve ever owned), the Fresh Brew is about as basic as a coffee maker gets — the only piece of programmability on the thing is a timed brew feature, and since that’s more than I’ll ever use, I don’t mind the lack of other electronic bells and whistles that cost more and could fail.